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1x4 Butt joints are less likely to open up than miters. Y2 in. by 1 in. %-in. wood floors with no thresholds. They're finished with three coats of polyurethane, but new scratches appear on a daily basis. Refinishing one floor would require refinishing them all (along with removing all the furniture). Are there any effective spot remedies that you know of, such as Bona X? -CHARLEEN GOSSELIN via email Q Hardwood Floors in Gales Ferry, Conn., replies: Oil-based polyurethane can take a long time to cure. If the original flooring installer rushed the coats-that is, recoated before the previous coat cured fully-the lower coats will remain soft for a very long time (up to eight months), and they can fail prematurely. A floor-restoration product like Bona X (www.bonakemi.com; 800-574-4674) might be a short- A Charles Peterson, owner of Connecticut Premier Fix for a scratched wood floor My house has continuous Brazilian cherry term fix for you, but the longterm solution is to recoat your floor with a commercial twopart water-based finish such as Bona Traffic. It doesn't matter whether the base coat is oil- or water-based: If it is cured fully, you can coat over it with either water- or oil-based finish. The new finish will go right over the old finish, provided that the old finish is well-adhered and clean. But the new finish probably won't hide deep scratches completely. To do that, you would have to sand the floors to the depth of the scratches and then refinish (FHB #156, "New Life for an Old Floor," pp. 94-99). Don't worry, though. You don't have to empty your house to refinish the floors. Rather than moving out all your furniture, your floors could be finished room by room using blue masking tape in doorways or on the butt ends of floorboards at room divisions to mask off one room at a time. Good luck. 1x4 Not-50-common trim details Susanka, and I loved the style and trim details. I'd like to incorporate some "Sarah-style" trim details into the house I'm building now. My plan is to use clear maple for the door and window trim. I would like to do something more interesting than mitered casings, but what? -GENE ANDERSEN Northern Minnesota Q 2004), A 104 FINE HOMEBUILDING Sarah Susanka, an architect and the author of Home by Design (The Taunton Press, replies: Just for the record, Gene, I'm not a big fan of mitered corners, either. There's nothing inherently wrong with them; it's just a stylistic preference. You can do so many things with trim around doors and windows to make them I used to live in a house designed by Sarah appear a little more interesting than the standard miteredcorner look. I like to join head and side casings with butt joints rather than miters. One way to dress them up is to add an additional narrow piece of trim just below the head casing, something perhaps it stands proud of the jamb and head trim pieces (drawing above). A rounded profile is a common detail for a piece like this. There are illustrations of this approach in my book Creating the Not So Big House (The Taunton Press, 2002). This detail, employed by architect Robert Knight, adds character to simple buttjoined casing. For more "Sarah-style" trim ideas, see "Drawing Board" in FHB #171 (p. 136). i4 in. thicker so that